


Dream a Little Dream of Me

by splkespiegel



Category: Cowboy Bebop
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Multi, Past Relationship(s), i promise i'll get good enough at writing faye to do something about her soon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-25 02:03:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4942477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/splkespiegel/pseuds/splkespiegel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ed still calls the Bebop crew every now and then, usually just to talk about something she'd found exciting that day. This time was something entirely different.<br/>Set post-series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream a Little Dream of Me

The Bebop, Jet sometimes found himself thinking, was far too big for just two people. Three years ago he would have said it was perfect for two, and four years ago he would have said it was nice to have such a big ship all to himself.

But now that it had had so many people in it at once, he couldn’t help but notice how empty it felt in their absence. The chatter of Spike, Ed, and Ein was an awful lot like a noisily malfunctioning air conditioner – you got used to it after long enough, sometimes you even found it comforting, and when it disappeared you noticed straight away.

Even now, months after Spike had died and Ed and Ein had left, Jet was still finding little things of theirs around. Here he’d see a wrench or a screwdriver that he knew did not belong to him, there he’d stumble upon a tiny white shirt. Every time it stung a little less, but it never stopped stinging entirely.

Every few weeks, when things would quiet down a little and he and Faye could afford to take some down time between bounties, Jet would find himself with far too much time to sit around and think. He wasn’t one to complain about time to relax, but inevitably his mind would wander to shocks of red hair, the sound of a tag jingling against a collar, mismatched eyes that he could lose himself in if he focused on them for too long.

Jet was lying on the couch, stuck in the middle of one of these bouts of overthinking, when he noticed the monitor to his left flicker and go out.

He moved to tap the side of the screen to get it to cooperate, but flinched when it flicked back on only to display a yellow, sniggering face. A second later the face was replaced with an entirely more welcome one. Jet would have recognized that face in a crowd of a thousand, or a hundred thousand – bright red hair, dark skin, and huge, inquisitive brown eyes.

“Ed!” He shouted, grinning ear to ear. “What are you doing here?”

"Hello Jet-person!” Ed sing-songed, pulling Ein from off screen and onto her lap. “Ed wanted to check in on Bebop! It’s been a long-long time since Ed saw you.” She adjusted her goggles on her head and, apparently deciding that she didn’t like them there, pulled them down to her neck. “Where’s Faye-Faye? Ed has so much to tell you, Ed wants her to hear too!”

Just as Jet sat up to call for Faye, he froze. He had just processed what Ed had said, and she didn’t mention Spike at all.

He looked back at the screen and willed himself not to trip up trying to ask why Ed had not asked him to call Spike in, too. Perhaps he had stared like that for a moment too long, because Ed piped up first.

“Ed knows all about Spike-person.” She said, her smile disappearing. “Ed watched the Bebop when Ed could from Earth. Ed knows you’re sad and Ed is sad too. If you and Faye-Faye don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to.”

Jet sighed and ran a hand over the back of his head, still poised to sit up but not quite there yet. “Maybe… don’t mention it… him,” he corrected himself, “around Faye. I don’t want to see her get upset.”

Ed nodded gravely, hugging Ein a little tighter to her chest. “Ed doesn’t want to make Faye-Faye cry. Ed won’t talk about Spike-person when she’s here.”

“You know, Ed,” Jet said in a sudden burst of emotion that he couldn’t contain, “he died doing something very brave.” He nearly winced at the word “died”. He hadn’t even said Spike’s name since that day, and it had been two months. “Something very, very brave. And he was happy, he didn’t…” Jet paused, hesitant to use the word again. “He wasn’t sad.”

Jet resisted the urge to say “he’s in a better place” at the end of that sentence. He didn’t need to burden the kid with those kinds of thoughts; she was too young. All he wanted to do was make sure that she knew that everything was okay now, or at least as okay as a world without Spike could be.

Ed stopped to ponder that for a moment before smiling. “Happy, happy! Spike-person was always happy.” She said, standing up and spinning Ein in a circle. “You can call Faye-Faye now, we have so much to tell her about Earth and Ed’s father-person!”

By the end of their call a few hours later, Jet found himself a lot more at ease than he had been before. Something to mix things up was always nice, especially with life as monotonous as it was for them, and no one was better at mixing things up then Ed.

\--

Ed called them every few days after that. Sometimes she immediately started babbling about an asteroid she and Ein had chased down, or about their luck tracking her father, and other times she asked them what they had been up to lately and laughed along with them as they told stories of wild chases from city to city for just one bounty head.

One day, a few months after Ed had first re-established contact with the Bebop, Jet heard his communicator go off. He unclipped it from his belt and flipped it on, expecting to see Bob with inside info on a new bounty, or perhaps Faye, if she had gone off without telling him again.

Instead, he was greeted by Ed, leaning extremely close to her own screen. This was odd, he had to admit. Ed had made a point up until then to always call them through the screen in the living room, but here she was, broadcasting only to Jet’s comm.

“Ed has something to tell you.” She whispered. “Don’t let Faye-Faye hear. You told Ed not to talk about Spike-person around Faye-Faye.”

Jet felt his heart drop into his stomach. He had come to terms with what had happened to Spike, but still he felt his mind race to improbable conclusions, clinging to lingering shreds of false hope.

“Ed found a place you might want to visit.” She said, sending an address to his comm. It was somewhere in Tharsis City, on Mars. “Row 7, east section, okay?”

She hung up before Jet could respond.

\--

Five minutes later, Jet was in the Hammerhead and taking off. He had gotten lucky – Ed had called while they were in Mars’s orbit, most likely on purpose. He had just enough of his wits about him to scribble a note to Faye, informing her that he’d be back later that night. Shit, he might have to go after a small fry on his way back to justify running off.

He pushed the thought to the back of his mind, and something new filled his thoughts. _Row 7, east section, row 7, east section, row 7, east section,_ cycling through his brain like a mantra as he rocketed off toward the closest astral gate.

When he finally touched down in the nearest parking lot to the address Ed had sent, Jet’s worst fears were confirmed – he could see a cemetery down the street, and he didn’t have to look at the sign to know that it was his destination.

He nodded to the man at the gate as he entered, trudging along the path until he very nearly tripped over a knee-high sign that read “row 7”. He paused for a moment to process. He could easily turn around, leave the cemetery, and hop right back in his Hammerhead as if he had never been there. He could act like he had never received that transmission and he had no idea what would inevitably be waiting for him down that row.

Jet steeled himself and turned right, making his way to the east end of the property. He scanned the names on the grave markers as he passed, searching for the one name he knew he would find.

There, at the end of the seventh row in the Tharsis Cemetery, Jet found a grave whose marker read “Spike Spiegel”, and to its right, one that read only “Julia”.

As he sat on the ground in front of them, Jet registered two things – the first, that he was so incredibly happy and yet so incredibly sad at the same time that Spike and Julia had been buried next to each other. Clearly they had seen each other at least once before the end, as both graves bore the same date of passing. He wondered, distantly, what had happened to them, other than the obvious.

The second was that, somehow, by sitting there in front of Spike’s grave, the entire thing seemed more real.

He found that he didn’t feel like he was going to cry, or like he was hollowed out, like he had felt when he had first received the news all those months ago. Instead he felt a grim sort of acceptance, something clicking inside of him that told him that this was his reality now.

With that fact in mind, Jet started to talk.

He tried to keep his voice down, at first, to only mumble, but as he kept talking he didn’t care enough to regulate his volume. He talked about the day they met each other, when Spike asked him for a “ride”, the day when it became obvious that it was no longer a ride and rather a budding friendship. He talked about their first kiss, about all those nights when Spike whispered Julia’s name in his sleep and Jet wanted to curl in on himself and die, about their first and only dance, the one they shared after coming down from the high of a chase 2 years ago. He talked about all those times that he wanted to reach into Spike’s chest and piece his heart back together and hold him so tight that it would never break again.

After fifteen minutes had passed Jet became aware that he was crying, choking out his words and clenching his hands into fists in his lap. He couldn’t bring himself to stop, so he cried and babbled until he was spent. Before he took off, he stopped at the grocery store down the street and purchased a bouquet of flowers. He placed it between the two graves, marked Spike Spiegel and Julia, and made his way back to his ship.

\--

“So where did you run off to?” Faye asked as Jet came back into the main room later that night.

“Had to take care of some personal business.” Jet answered, not quite recovered enough to hold a proper conversation.

Faye opened her mouth to antagonize him about this “personal business”, but, seeing how tired he clearly was, she closed it again and walked off toward her room.

She paused in the doorway to the hall and looked back over her shoulder. “You know, if you ever need to talk…” She started. They had been living together for quite some time now, and she could tell that he was torn up about Spike again. Perhaps talking about it would help her, too.

Jet smiled despite himself. “Yeah. I’ll remember that.”


End file.
